SCRUM AND AGILITY, IT’S A JOURNEY
Scrum is worldwide the most applied process for Agile software development. Yet, the use of Scrum in itself does not make a company more agile. Scrum.org has created a new framework, "Agility Path", that guides organisations, managers and leaders to progressively increasing their agility. It is a journey of continuous improvement, dedication and persistence.
Ralph Jocham and Gunther Verheyen will introduce Agility Path.
Ralph Jocham is one of the first Agility Path Engagement Managers, enabled by Scrum.org to be a guide and coach in delivering this framework to organizations. Gunther Verheyen directs the Professional Series of Scrum.org and has co-developed the framework.
Gunther Verheyen

Gunther Verheyen (gunther.verheyen@scrum.org) ventured into IT and software development after graduating as an Industrial Engineer in electronics in 1992. His Agile journey started with eXtreme Programming and Scrum in 2003. Years of dedication followed, working with several teams and organizations doing Scrum in varying circumstances. Utilizing the experience gained, Gunther gradually moved towards being the driving force behind some large-scale enterprise transformations.
Gunther works with Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org as Director of the ‘Professional’ series of Scrum.org. He shepherds the courseware and assessments for PSD, PSM, PSF, and PSPO. Gunther is also Professional Scrum trainer and contributor to Scrum.org’s ‘Agility Path’ framework to help organizations go through the transformations required to increase their agility.
Gunther lives in Antwerp (Belgium) with his wife Natascha, and their children Ian, Jente and Nienke.
Find Gunther on Twitter as @ullizee or read more of his musings on Scrum on his personal blog, http://ullizee.wordpress.com.

Ralph Jocham
Ralph started his career 1997 in Germany where he worked as a programmer for START and Siemens Medical Technology.
In 1998 he joined Oracle, UK, working on JDeveloper. Two years later he moved to the USA and consulted in NYC for Spherion. Ralph later relocated to San Jose to help Applied Biosystems, a leading biotech life science company, to transition to Agile. Early in 2007 he joined ThoughtWorks, as an agile coach. During that time his clients included, The Gap, LinkedIn, Google, and Roche. In late 2009 he moved to Bern and joined Zühlke to help kickstart their agile offerings.
In 2011 he founded effective agile.
Ralph is a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Bern teaching an agile living case in the medical technology department..

KANBAN IN ACTION
Implementing and using Kanban is not only implementing and using a Kanban board. Of course a Kanban board helps with the visualization and managing the flow but managing a Kanban system is more. We all know that “less is more” thus limiting the work in progress and a Kanban System for sure will help your team achieve more.
Little’s Law is a magnificent tool that shows the Kanban System balancing the capability of the system against its demand. Through Kanban implementation in Bitdefender various teams achieved greater visibility of the work, greater collaboration and process improvements were enforced from the team.

Adrian Lupei
Adrian is Project Manager and Software Engineering Manager at Bitdefender, with 4+ years of experience in Project Management
He is passionate about applying Agile methods in projects, and found of software tools that can facilitate their implementation in companies.
Adrian is an Agile expert, Certified PMI-ACP, Scrum Master Scrum Product Owner.

SPRINT BACKLOG SPECIFIED BY EXAMPLES
The Scrum Guide defines the Sprint Backlog as the set of Product Backlog items selected for the Sprint plus a plan for delivering the product Increment and realizing the Sprint Goal.
For many, it is assumed that the plan is a list of technology-facing tasks ignoring the ‘why’ in the first instance. Splitting requirements into tasks can help developers to think about the amount of work involved but it is a poor strategy to foster quality centric collaboration. A task doesn’t provide something that can be visibly verified and which stakeholders care about.
Doing the right thing and doing the right thing right - this is the paramount problem of software construction. Even though Scrum helps trawling the right requirements through ongoing Product Backlog refinement, almost invariably there is a communication gap -- a misunderstanding between product owner and the development team. This is explained because the requirements are unclear, tend to be abstract and often omit the ‘obvious’ details. Therefore, they are hard to grasp, not tangible and cannot easily be projected into a cohesive tested solution.
This raises those fundamentals questions: how can the team be sure that the plan is adequate in fulfilling the underlying requirements in the required quality? How can they foster collaboration and confirm repeatedly on a recurring basis that the software under construction always is working right and meets the evolving requirements?

Ralph Jocham
Ralph started his career 1997 in Germany where he worked as a programmer for START and Siemens Medical Technology.
In 1998 he joined Oracle, UK, working on JDeveloper. Two years later he moved to the USA and consulted in NYC for Spherion. Ralph later relocated to San Jose to help Applied Biosystems, a leading biotech life science company, to transition to Agile. Early in 2007 he joined ThoughtWorks, as an agile coach. During that time his clients included, The Gap, LinkedIn, Google, and Roche. In late 2009 he moved to Bern and joined Zühlke to help kickstart their agile offerings.
In 2011 he founded effective agile.
Ralph is a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Bern teaching an agile living case in the medical technology department..

SOFTWARE CRAFTSMANSHIP APPRENTICESHIP PATTERNS
For a long time, it wasn’t very clear what people meant by “professional”, the word has many uses after all, and it’s easy to equivocate between them. We can say a professional is someone who is (regularly) paid to complete some task—a hired hand. We can say a professional is someone who conducts herself according to certain standards to complete some task.
The implication is that we are impressed with her demeanor, or we are put off by how “cold” her demeanor is. We can say that a professional is someone extremely skilled at what he or she does: a person with expertise.
We can, perhaps lastly, say professionals are just those people who have completed certifications and have reached codified milestones that separate amateurs from professionals. For example, the Japanese Go Association (Nihon Ki-in) holds tournaments that decide who becomes a professional Go player and who remains an amateur—other professional Go associations have their own processes. That is, there’s a credentialing process Go players can go through when they want to become professionals, and that gives them access to new play spaces, circles of friends, tournaments, and notoriety in their community. The word “professional” has a specific meaning for them: it’s an institution, a club, and a set of obligations.
But it’s not clear what programmers mean when they talk about the profession, professionals, or professionalism....

Edward Moraru
Passionate software developer, continuously looking to improve my skills and abilities. 12+ years of experience in creating software projects from small to big have taught me to find the balance between quality, speed of development and customer satisfaction.
I've specialized on enterprise web applications right from the beginning of my career, improving continuously my Java skills by using a host of technologies like: Servlets, JSP, JDBC, EJB, HTML, JavaScript, and many frameworks as Struts, Stripes, and Hibernate.
I've also managed the infrastructure and architecture of several projects (with Ant and Maven), creating the layout of the project, establishing the build process, maintaining the source code repository (with Subversion).
Also I've been involved into an initiative of professional growth within the company, in which I've driven/hosted several Code Retreats for my colleagues, made presentation about best practices, refactoring, and established the company source code format.
Specialties: Agile methodologies, Software craftsmanship, web applications architecture & design, Java and Java EE applications.

Ciprian Dobre-Trifan
Trainer, software engineer, project manager, engaged in developing team & software solution architectures. I have over 8 years experience in software engineering and managing IT projects.
As a software engineer, I have a solid and continuing hands-on experience in working with various programming languages, technologies, development methodologies and IT solution architectures. My skills span all software engineering knowledge areas with applicability in business domains such as Business-to-Business, Enterprise Application Integration, Managed File Transfer, Data Migration, Data Manipulation.
As a project manager, I have experience in managing and leading complex software projects, for which I have built several various size IT teams, starting from selection and recruitment up to appraisals and continuous development of each member of the team.
As a trainer I have been designing and delivering various learning programs on both technical and non-technical subjects. My professionalism and continuous preoccupation for the learning and development of organizations as well as individuals is strengthened by the Diploma in training management and organization learning that I obtained after following a year long learning program at the Institute of Training and Occupational Learning.